iPads for Re-telling

Our school is blessed with a lot of tools to use for technology. My challenge has been to stop what we are doing and think about different ways we can do it, and use technology for the same activity.

One of the skills we work on is re-telling a story. Today we took one of our Open Court stories and instead if doing the traditional re-telling on paper, we did it in Book Creator.

I was amazed at how I could give the instructions and basically say, now go make this in Book Creator. I didn't show them how to use Book Creator, and magically, they did go do it! They took pictures of illustrations from the book and added the text. Some chose to speak the story instead of typing it. That is okay too - the skill we are testing is re-telling, so if they write or speak, doesn't matter to me!

Not only were they totally able to figure it out, they loved doing it! We had an hour to work on this and at first things started a little slowly, but they got motoring quite quickly. When the recess bell rang they begged to be able to continue working on it.

They never have begged to continue re-telling a story. Never. Ever!

At the end of our work somebody discovered talk to text. This. Is. Going. To. Change. Our. Lives!